I was invited to present a keynote, of sorts, at the Merging Media 2013 conference – a short and sweet two day conference featuring many great topics and good international speakers with a focus on the business/production side of multi platform but also the more usual esoteric aspects of transmedia and inherent community thinking. My talk was originally going to be a show and tell of all the new opportunities afforded to us by mobile, social & always-on networks, eye-candy with a chunk of futurist ‘my how the world is changing’ – but I decided to turn it more into a ‘what makes a compelling experience’ combined with ‘state of the industry (covered in my previous post)’ combined with a ‘process approach to creating service’, talk instead – with a little of the navigating the new landscape for good measure. So waaay too much in the time allotted, but at least this article has room to breathe 🙂

I hope I give a flavour of the talk below. I believe Merging Media will be making videos available too – which I won’t be able to watch as I rushed the latter part :(. The first part was actually partly scripted so that made it easier to copy some of that below the slides but there is much much more afterwards with lots of embedded media, I think there is a flow in the post. Obviously the slides only tell a quarter of the story and embedded after the break, but first…

Hello and thanks for inviting me to keynote here in wonderful Vancouver. Being one quarter French Canadian I do feel a little affinity with some of you, and have enjoyed a little time exploring & capturing the environment in the two days prior to this conference. But moving on let me apologise. I have struggled hard to find an innovative new theme, any new jewels of wisdom for you to ponder and apply to your own projects. So much in the transmedia arena has been talked about, theorised and postulated as the journey has only just begun. Perhaps the journey through the presentation itself may throw up some nuggets?. The media and storytelling environment in still in major transition and I and nobody else really knows where we are going, all I can do is prepare myself and others for this change. But first:

An Organic Multiplatform Transmedia Experience?

This is where I live at the moment and where, I believe, I had a compelling multiplatform experience. It was about two weeks ago. It involved personal life and death decisions, it involved loved ones, friends who lost everything, physical exertion, quests and games, feeling part of and working with a community, rich information, lots of information, the authorities, the law, anxiety, stress, stories of loss and heroism and making profound choices.

Australia is a place bubbling with enthusiastic new Transmedia talent and I was lucky to present and moderate a great panel at the Sydney Opera House early in July 2011 with representatives from pervasive film making, advertising, art and industry R&D. It was all about experiential storytelling and services and part of the Creative Sydney fortnight and a Metro Screen organised evening (more later).

Not sure what I have been drinking but last two posts are drawing from probably the oldest shared story and one that has been distributed across more media platforms than any other story – I quote from one of the earlier ‘chapters’:

Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Genesis 11:1-9 – via Wikipedia

WHAT DO ‘NORMAL’ PEOPLE CALL THIS ‘NEW’ STUFF?

The world of fragmented media is constantly evolving and finding words to describe this new ecosystem of form will also constantly evolve. If a ‘normal’ person is in the cinema they say they are “watching a film”, in front of the box they are “watching TV”, sat around a Monopoly board “playing a game”, holding printed paper “reading a book” – but what do we ‘they’ call that thing that combines all of these? If these were ‘not’ normal people then a wide range of people asked to comment on a cool ‘????’ service might look like –

As an industry (digital, interactive, multi-platform, transmedia?) we have not provided normal ‘users’ with a term they can use. The other 6 billion people on this planet are not going to call the services that ‘combine’ or utilise the use of media platforms, any of the above names, any time soon – so we need to get back to the drawing board folks.

If this were sport and we had just invented a sport that combined ten of the Olympic Track and Field events what would we call it? What about a sport that mashed together swimming, cycling and running in a sequential narrative, what would that be called? More importantly what would we hope the spectators would call it.

WHAT DO CREATORS CALL THEIR EMERGENT ‘STUFF’?

As I have mentioned in many previous posts, even creative ‘new’ story producers working on new channels, new platforms and for new user audiences are struggling to agree on a definitive term. A term that actually makes sense for them and their industry ‘tribe’. There are other problems. New emerging producers struggle with what to call their new ‘role’. Depending on which ‘culture’ you come from you will have a different word for exactly the same thing. This thing being ‘stuff’ made on all these new and old distinct platforms. ‘Stuff’ in this context is not specific and represents a pot pourri of utility services, stories, marketing etc:

But alongside this search for a ‘meaningful’ term, we have impatient wannabees screaming “forget all the semantic waffle and lets get on with making it”. But what are we making? Please explain! ‘carefully designed story elements across multiple platforms’? Is that it? Is it about widgets, services, entertainment, money, art, kool-aid, social change, advertising or all of the above? We are in an exciting emergent period of change, of ‘hybrid’ platform story telling yet settling on a specific term such as ‘transmedia’ or any of the other 10 or so contenders to describe it all is very odd.

Social media is a humbling experience much of the time. For one it is a super fast barometer of many aspects of our digital persona made up partly of a) our online influence, b) what people ‘feel’ about you (sentiment) and c) who we are connected too but more recently with the introduction of Twitter Lists we now have an element of ‘labelling’ aka ‘tagging’. Like most I am not keen on being pigeon holed, filed and rubber stamped as ‘this kind’ of person or someone who only ‘thinks/creates/is involved’ in those things, but I was fascinated this morning in doing what Laurel Papworth did some months ago, looking at how others saw me based only on my Twitter activity.

I have currently been added to 700 lists (which I think is up in the top 10% or so?) –

the key of course is that these lists are created un-prompted by those they follow, they have selected ‘you’ quietly in the background to be a part of a personal filter, carefully structured by users who want a way to distill the vastness of a 140 character universe of noise, that is twitter – making lists for themselves of a few key personal influencers through to hundreds of sharing tweeters across several lists on quite broad topics, the lists themselves followed by thousands.

There were over 6.5 million twitter lists at the start of 2010 so I suspect at least double that for 2011 according to TNW and there are hundreds of tList directories on the web now such as ListAtlas that focuses on the most popular lists such as 22 000 following the @bieberarmy :: justinfollowplease list of 91 fans who “want to be followed” by JB himself or 38 verified world leaders compiled into this list @verified :: World Leaders followed by 15 000 or so. But back to my own little world…I am not sure if the lists below represent ‘who I am’, especially as 75% of my twitter activity is sharing links, but they certainly represent areas I work in and am interested by.

… without further ado – I quickly used TextWrangler to pull out key words and broke the 700 lists (I am on) into smaller ‘categorised’ batches. This serves as a one stop shop for me to dip in and out and decide which lists I will follow and for you to possibly find ones you may find of interest.